The verdict on the F1 driver market

Since Formula 1 world champion Nico Rosberg decided enough was enough and hung up his helmet just after the end of the 2016 season, everyone has waited in suspense for who Mercedes would choose to replace him.

Easily the most coveted seat in F1, which should be the plum drive for 2017, there were plenty of drivers eyeing a career-making opportunity with the team that had not just won the drivers' and constructors' titles in each of the last three years, but has utterly dominated.

So it was always going to be a difficult decision for Mercedes, especially with the team that dominated the previous four seasons - Red Bull - aiming to capitalise on the major regulation changes to try to get back on top.

Doubly so given Paddy Lowe, the man who has kept Mercedes fully focused for the last three years, is heading off with a move to Williams likely. I don't think he was exclusively responsible for that success by any means, but he certainly kept everyone's feet on the ground.

Once Rosberg made the announcement, I'm pretty sure every driver's manager would have made a courtesy call to the management of Mercedes just to remind them of the virtues of their driver(s) - even those that might not have been immediately available.

Quite how Toto Wolff, who is involved in Valtteri Bottas's management, made this call is not clear, but he certainly had no problem getting through or with bad reception, I'm sure.

Inevitably, people got excited about the idea of a rematch between Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton and it would have been fantastic to see. But it wouldn't have satisfied the needs of Mercedes for the future and, even if it were a deal that was possible to do, it would have been short-term thinking.

And remember, too, Alonso is a political animal. That's the last thing Hamilton or anyone in the team would want heading into a season of such change.

So Mercedes needed a driver who was available, or at least gettable, and would not create too much friction and competition in the team so it could focus on the outside world of Red Bull and Ferrari. That's where the main competition should come from, and we've often seen when rules change that someone gets it right and someone gets it wrong.

We'll only know once testing gets up and running and then it will be up to who can react fastest and spend the money in the right way to catch up.

So the big question is, is Bottas the man for the job?

While he hasn't yet had the chance to win any grands prix, in my opinion there is nobody currently better to be lined up against Hamilton in these circumstances. He is Finnish, and with that nothing deters him. He just gets on with his job and won't allow Hamilton to overpower him.

If Rosberg had a fault, it was that he was too nice a guy. But Bottas won't suffer from that, he will be fair but hard. Watch out Lewis, you have some real competition in that car in the other side of the garage.

Bottas has shown in his years in F1 that he has car control that is the envy of most (he is always one of the first to push in low-grip conditions on a Friday morning, for example), he doesn't make mistakes and when he has the tools he can deliver the results consistently. Since 2014, he has been in a team that has been sliding the wrong way down the performance slope, so we haven't seen his true potential and as he has been getting better, the car has been getting worse.

He will gel with Mercedes very quickly. It's not just circuit miles that allow a driver to settle in because there are tools like the state of the art driver-in-the-loop simulators that he can use to get up to speed and get familiar with the car very quickly. He has driven a Mercedes-powered Williams for the past three years, so he will know that side immediately.

So this was a good choice by Mercedes in the circumstances and I think he will surprise a few people.

MASSA BACK TO WILLIAMS

As far as Bottas's replacement Felipe Massa is concerned, I can only repeat what I have said before that I don't like it when a driver retires and comes back. It suggests they haven't thought things through well enough before making the decision to go.

Take Jenson Button. He isn't retiring, he is taking a year out with the possibility that somewhere, somehow a door will open and he will get back in. That might not happen, but at least he has kept his mind focused on the fact that he is still an F1 driver.

Williams let Massa go for good reasons and signed up Lance Stroll as his replacement, so now it decides that it really needs his experience to help Stroll get his feet under the table.

It's a standard argument, but the one thing Max Verstappen has showed the blinkered world of F1 is that experience counts for little. The cars are set up, developed and engineered from the back of the garage and as long as you can drive fast, the rest will be done for you.

So Williams could have gone for another novice alongside Stroll, say someone like Antonio Giovinazzi who did such a good job in GP2 as a rookie in 2016, and in reality be no worse off.

You know what you are going to get with Massa and with 250 grand prix starts he has all the experience in the world, but I always liked to have young drivers with something to prove on the team rather than those who have been there and done that and are set in their ways.

WEHRLEIN ENDS UP AT SAUBER

It was clear early on that Mercedes simply did not have the balls to go for a young and inexperienced driver. So with Esteban Ocon already having signed for Force India, and Manor potentially on the brink of extinction, it made sense that it would help Pascal Wehrlein into a seat at Sauber.

Wehrlein has a year's experience with Manor in 2016 and at times showed himself to be very capable, most famously with that point for 10th place in the Austrian Grand Prix. So you would expect him to do well for Sauber, but the question is whether it is a good move for Wehrlein himself?

Yes, it keeps him in an F1 race seat, albeit in a team that should be doing better than it has lately. He needs to build on his experience, but for him and Mercedes it would have been better to get him in at Williams as part of the Bottas deal.

Mercedes did try to make that happen in its early talks with Williams, and that would have been far better for Wehrlein than heading into the unknown with Sauber and it's 2016-specification Ferrari engine.

Mercedes obviously feels Wehrlein needs more experience, but remains confident in his ability. So this move to Sauber is with a view to monitoring his progress and understanding what level he is at so that he's ready just in case Hamilton wakes up one day and does a Rosberg.

You never know, with Bottas as Hamilton's team-mate, that could happen sooner rather than later.